The wheels are beginning to turn again as top leagues around Europe are gearing up to return amid the coronavirus crisis despite France’s Ligue 1 having voted to end their season and the Premier League are still putting plans together to complete the season behind closed doors at neutral venues.
While the leagues in France, Holland and Belgium all voted to end their seasons, the top leagues in Spain, Germany and Italy are all inching closer to a return after being halted by the coronavirus pandemic as there is a resolve to ensure that the 2019/20 campaigns are played to a finish despite issues around social distancing and infection rates.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said on Saturday that he hopes to see La Liga returning behind closed doors “soon”, despite 276 people dying in Spain in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of deaths in the country to 25,100.
“We hope that leagues and federations will come to a decision soon,” Sanchez told a press briefing on Saturday.
“We already started to allow individual training sessions for team sports, we hope [a return] will come sooner rather than later but we’ll see it first on television rather than in the stadiums, I’m afraid.”
Germany’s Bundesliga chiefs are hopeful that they could become the first major league to resume as they continue to target playing this month, with the German government having the final say on plans to resume on either May 16 or 23. Bayer Leverkusen sporting director Simon Rolfes is confident of the plans:
“The most important thing was we got good feedback from politicians for our concepts for games without spectators,” Rolfes told BBC World Service Sport. “They [the government] think that we are able to do it.”
“In the next week we will see which decisions are there. I don’t know exactly when but we hope we play in May, the middle or the end of May, we don’t know.”
Meanwhile, in Italy, all 20 Serie A clubs voted to continue the season on Friday, and now four top-flight sides are set to resume training at the start of next week.
Sassuolo, Bologna, Parma and SPAL have all been allowed to come back after a decree was issued by the Emilia-Romagna region, with other clubs forced to wait until May 18.
A Sassuolo statement read: “Players will only be allowed access to the pitches in compliance with rules of social distancing, while access to the Sports Center will be prohibited.
“The individual sessions, which will take place during the mornings from Monday to Friday, with the use of three fields, with six players per hour (one player for each half of the pitch), will not be attended by the technical staff, while an emergency health supervision will be guaranteed.”